oren meets world: brand strategy playbook: a 5-tier process for marketing & planning

In this video, we are going to do brand planning for the entire year. And we're doing this on January 1, but it is useful at any point if you want to dive in and map out 12 months or just the future of your business, small or large. Last year, as many of you know, I launched a luxury product studio with a corresponding brand and designed and released over 100 products myself and on projects. And right now I'm here in Barcelona. We're at the Nobu Hotel. I'm doing what I do best, which is brand planning. I'm running a workshop for a global company. And in this video, I'm going to share the five-part brand planning strategy that I run when I do these workshops with companies small and large that just works. Let's lock in and explore a bit of Spain while we do it. First, we're going to go through the five. Part one and two go hand in hand. This is your product and the calendar. I'll talk through these one by one and then show how they overlap next. So first, think about your product releases for the year. And this is going to be a combination of what do you have ready for product. So for instance, if you already have things designed or in production, etc., as most people do, it's reviewing that. And then there's a question of what do we actually need? We have these things here. We have these things ready. Then the conversation shifts to where are we in the market and what do we need to do to stand out? And this is an important differentiation point because we have to put things into production early for most companies. Things are landing, but the world doesn't wait for you to finish production, right? Taste change, things change, positioning changes. I talk a lot about positioning because a lot of the brands I work with are in retail. My background is in retail marketing. And positioning is important because when you walk into a retail store, you are positioned against multiple other companies on the shelf. I come from a consumer electronics background. And so a lot of positioning there, if you walk into a store like Best Buy or a FNAC in Europe, Media Mart in Germany, that kind of thing, you will see three products in most categories. Headphones, phone cases, drones, certain toys, electronics, whatever it is. There will be at least three items in almost every category. And those three items are positioned by good, better, and best. And the good option tends to be the lowest price point. It's offering a deal to the customer, an easy pickup at a low price. This usually isn't the first mover in that product category. It wasn't the first person along. And you have better, which is your standard product. This is basically the product that everyone is going for, your most average sale. Then you have best, someone who's positioning by saying, hey, we're going to charge a higher price point, but we give a better experience. That tends to be an easy way to look at positioning for brands. But more importantly, you need to look at what other brands' roadmaps are, what your roadmap is, what consumer problem you're solving. And this goes for clothing, fashion, consumer goods, software, as much as anything. So when we talk about what do we actually need, for instance, if you are a hoodie or a t-shirt brand, you obviously see that there are now thousands and thousands of hoodie and t-shirt brands out there. So if you are not differentiating in some different way that's going to elevate you, you are probably going to have a rough year as your consumer base continues to get sapped by the widening market. So you need to think about what are those products that would help us stand out. That's what we map out in this part of the exercise. What do we have? What do we need? And let's focus on need because need is different than want. Need is if our business wants to survive and grow and meet our goals, what do our products need to be? And so for me, giving an example of my valuables brand, I released a lot of products last year to test the market because I realized with a big following and my skillset, I have the ability to sell a lot of things. I need to find out, I'd rather validate in the market by actually trying to sell what things are versus like leaking that out. I want to find out fast. I release things in apparel. I release things in kind of more fashion-driven apparel as well as more kind of classic apparel. I did footwear. I did shoe bags. I did client projects that were a little more public. They have like luxury goods. I did unisex products versus just men's products. I did belts and accessories. I did car accessories for me to validate. So one of my big needs is I need a product market fit. I need something that I know is going to scale, is doing better than the other products. And so right now I have two candidates for that. That's what I'm working through in my version of this exercise is how are these going to move. And the last part of product is your dream roadmap. This is a really important part of the exercise. Things a lot of companies ignore is they're not thinking about what would our perfect year look like from a product perspective. So I take some time and map that out. I think through what are all the ideal collaborations that we're actually ready for. I wouldn't go pie in the sky. Like if you're a smaller brand, you're like, hey, I want to do a Louis Vuitton collab. Let's look at what would be your perfect collab this year for where you're at. Because if you are a smaller brand, you're probably not ready for that collab. Collaborations, additions, licensing. So you want to run like Metallica, Hello Kitty or whatever it is. Your goal with this is to create a constant working document of things to add to for the ideal products in your roadmap. So for instance, I have a lot of car accessories as part of my brand. I want to work up to be able to do large car accessory collabs. I would love to be able to do the merchandise for Dodge Challenger, Ford Raptor. I'm positioned obviously a little more towards American companies. I'm not going to achieve that this year, but what are the collaborations on my dream roadmap that I can achieve is, hey, I could easily do something like that with car clubs, with shops, with accessories brands. That's the kind of thing I'm prepared for now. So I'm putting that on my list of dream things I want to get this year. So now we have, what do we have ready? We have, what do we need to survive and grow and hit our goals? And then we have our dream roadmap. I would just list those out. Create a working doc. This is best in a spreadsheet where you can literally have like a list going down and begin to think about, is this a dream product? Is this something we can do? What's its status, et cetera. And now we're going to put it in context of the calendar. This is a really important conversation to have because timing is everything in brand planning. When I go do workshops for big brands, it almost always is around timing because they have constraints, goals to hit, high periods and low periods, attention that needs to be gotten. Content is all based around timing. So a lot of it comes down to calendaring. And this is how we walk through it. And after that, we'll actually get into things like content, sales channels, and more. So the first thing to do if you have an existing brand is pull up your calendar by week from last year on Shopify. I used to have like a B plus version of this exercise. And then I saw this breakdown from Taylor Holiday who runs this agency called Common Thread that I have a lot of respect for. But how he does it, now I do it exactly like he does with this weekly breakdown because you can pull up your Shopify for G2C. You'll probably have a report like this that encompasses retail if you are, if you have sell-through data, if you are a retail supplier. But the goal of the 52 week, when you actually look at it, you're going to begin to see your peak weeks. And weeks are important because we're starting with product and then we're going to go into content. And you're going to start to see that a release or a content blitz can shift the nature of whether a week is up or down. But you're going to go through that calendar and you're looking at all your main peaks, all of the weeks that you're going to see. Usually it's like a week and a couple around it that are a peak. You want to identify all of this. You want to identify all the main areas where you already do good sales. I would literally list them out. The best way to do this is to print a big calendar like this out. Obviously put it up on a screen and then mark your big peaks and write out what product release, holiday you don't know, which is good to then dig into and figure out. Then look at your alternative peaks. Other things that happened that weren't quite as big may have some potential. You'll usually find for most brands, they'll have three or four big peaks and they'll have another two to five smaller peaks of things that kind of happened that went pretty well that bubbled. Now once you list them out, you're going to start to see, hey, do we want to replicate these? And are these going to be replicable or not? So for instance, if you went viral for some reason, some influencer posted you, you may not be able to replicate that. That peak may not come back this year. You may have to account for that. If it happened on Valentine's Day, for instance, and Valentine's Day is big for you, you go, all right, how are we going to go super hard on Valentine's Day? We'll talk about how we tie all these together. But you're going to see when you have this sketched out, I do my workshops mainly on whiteboards. And so we will actually go map this out month by month. You're going to look at across those 52 weeks and you're going to go like, all right, I have my peak and I have a few weeks around those peaks. I have an alternative peaks, a bunch of areas there. And then you're going to see lulls. For a lot of brands who aren't supplement brands or brands that are gifted for Valentine's Day, January, February becomes a lull. We're late in the planning process to release products for that time now in January, but you might want to think about this for the next year is how do you solve that, right? How do you make a giftable product? Like Valentine's Day can solve your whole January, February lull if you were able to create a product that works for that. A lot of brands think they can't create a product that works for that, but they're wrong. Even if you have like a hardcore goth brand oriented towards men, think about what your customer base is doing on Valentine's Day. Do they likely have a goth girlfriend? Is there a kit that you can begin to provide for them that makes their life easy? Begin to think about that user experience and user journey. Brainstorm some of that during the process because you're now at your job to identify these lulls and you're going to see them. There's going to be five or six points where you don't make sales. You're not making the sales you want. It may have happened to you for years. You may have seasonal products. Many of you know, I worked with this company Lift Foils for a long time. They're a hydrofoil electric surfboard company. We would absolutely dominate in the summers. People aren't trying to invest in hydrofoils in the winter. So we would have to do programming or at least plan our year around the fact that things aren't going to be as big in the winter. People don't buy this kind of products or focus on regions that do where Australia summer is actually western winter. So now that you have those gaps, we're going to talk about what you're going to do inside of it. So there's a list of options. So the first is a release. One thing I do constantly inside brand workshops, especially with medium, like small to medium brands. Let's say you're in the seven to like under 50 mil, eight figures. As you shift your release calendar, people that are doing big drops for seasonal clothing collections, we actually break it out. It's like, hey, if you're releasing 20 garments inside your spring collection, we're actually going to release 14. And then we're going to do three, two product drops like on low weeks for things that we think are really interesting or we can make good content around or we have an influencer plan for us. All of a sudden we can get some smaller spikes. That's a really easy one if you have like a wide range. So you have releases. That's tool number one, the fill gap is product releases. You go back to your dream state, additions, licensing, collaborations. If you don't have a good idea, is this a time to launch a collab? Is this time to go pay a percentage for licensing? I think licensing probably deserves a whole video. It's one of the most underrated tools for brands I can think of. You may have seen me or heard me talk about the licensing expo in Las Vegas. When I was doing licensing, I worked at Gel Blaster. We did a halo edition blaster, for instance, that I worked on where we would go to the licensing show, meet with the people that are licensing and figure it out. There's a booth there. You've seen a lot of these big brands like license heavy metal or have done heavy metal collabs. They're just paying 10%, 12% royalty in a flat fee to be able to use that iconography. There's a booth at the licensing expo that literally you can go through and you can get Metallica, Motley Crue, Slayer, who roll through. There's a No Limit Records booth right down the way too. It covers like the Gambit. It's an interesting trade show to go to to look at this kind of stuff. And also if your brand has IP that's licensable, it's interesting too, the Pudgy Penguins are there pushing their IP, which I thought was a smart move as well. But I won't dive too deep into that rabbit hole. And there's releases, there's licensing, et cetera. There's cultural events. Is there something happening on those weeks you can tap into? Again, go back to Valentine's Day, back to school, summer break, that kind of stuff. What is there that you might be able to tap into culturally? They might be able to have an event or a promotion or content around it. That's their second way to fill the gap. Then the third way is to create an event. I'll use Tarte Cosmetics as an example. They go launch Tarte Island where they invite a bunch of influencers out, basically have a reality show playing out on TikTok. They created an event to give them hype to sell products in a downtime for them. You'll see tech companies will go launch their product roadmap keynote or whatever it is. This is a great opportunity to have an influencer house or a three-day challenge, or we're gonna go live, or we're gonna create our annual, our 10-year anniversary, whatever it is. Is there an event you can create? And again, it can be just online. It doesn't have to be big budget, but how do you create a concept? Pull something out of thin air that you can then promote and make content around that can help fill that sales gap. Because your goal overall is to maintain or increase your peaks and then bring up all the areas in time around it. Because we're now on a 24-7 promotions calendar for most brands. And if you're doing that, if you're tying in your product releases and you're tying in that calendar, then you are already just winning at life for your brand planning for the next year. Usually I will end this section. We will have whiteboarded out all the gaps and we'll have identified, hey, can we do a release in this gap? Is there a cultural event we can hit in this gap? So we'll just pull it up and Google it right there. Or are we gonna create our own moment in this gap? And that will be the end of the product and calendar section of this exercise. And then it gets to the fun part because content has to be layered on top of all of this. So I'm gonna show you a little more of the city and then we will lock in on content and on channels before we get to the fun part, which is threats and mitigation. All right, so content. Right now what we have is we have all the products that we are going to release. We have plan, all the ones that we want to release are tentative to plan. We have a calendar of the year of what we did last year and the goals we need to fill areas we have. Now we need to assign content to that. Before we do that, we start with where we're at. As a brand, where are you at with content? Post-mortem last year. What content worked? What was our best performing content? Not just views. I don't care about how many views. I care about what content drove sales, interest, followers, influencers, fans. It may not be your highest viewed content and go summarize that. What are we doing well? What are we doing bad? Who are the influencers that are working for us? Who are the creators or UGC that's working well for us? What are the posts that are working out for us? And then break it down by network. Well, I usually just assign, repeat, improve, ignore. It's the three status. So repeat, hey, we did these things. We did it well. Can we repeat it? That's the question you have to ask yourself. We think the social network is gonna be the same. We think this will still work. You have to ask yourself that question. And if it will, you can just run it back. Repeat, keep doing it. Improve is, hey, we've been doing this thing. It's not very good. We have to change it. This is your moment now to be like, we can't just keep doing the same bullshit. Improve it. Item two. Item three is ignore. Ignore is important because so many brands try to do everything. At some point, like just don't do it. Like I don't do a lot currently for my brand on TikTok. I will at some point, but I don't have the bandwidth right now. So ignore. And be okay with ignoring things. The big brand exercise, even with huge brands. Like, okay, is something working? Like lean in and start to think about, do we really need to start focusing on one of these? Then what are they? What do we think is the best ROI of all the ignores that we should actually start to move on? We'll get to that later. So next up is pillars. If you've been through Cut30 or heard me talk about Cut30, which is like my content training program. You know, I focus on pillars for brands and for creators all the time. Pillars means repeatable content that you do all the time. So for instance, a pillar of my content, if you've watched my short form videos, is packaging content. I make packaging content roughly every two weeks. It's a pillar of my content. Always does pretty well. But pillars are either coming or going. Packaging content for me used to be on the up and up. Now it's kind of on the down. So it's still a pillar, but it's not a huge performer for me. It may no longer be a pillar for me in like six months. But you start to think about as a brand, okay, a pillar for us could be, hey, we do content with this creator. We do unboxing videos. We do whatever. The things you recurrently do that work well, what are they? And if you don't have a bunch of things that work well, what are they going to be? What are you going to try? Your goal is to have four pillars for your content. Four recurring, repeatable topics, formats, video types that you're able to do. Like literally every, I'd say about every two weeks, say one week to a month is given fair. Every brand's different. You are repeating this stuff and ask yourself, all right, how often am I repeating it? Do we think it is coming or going? This is a question I ask all the time about trends, about content. Do we think we're improving? This is going to go up. Do we think we're just dying and we're going to lose it? Sports is having that in your head. So, you know, I need to replace this, whatever. And have that conversation. Okay, we need to replace some of these pillars. We're going to need new ones. What are our ideas, et cetera. Now you have your post-mortem of last year. You have your pillars of your content. What are your most important rocks of the content that you want to do? Let me go through release support. Pull back up your calendar and you go through all this. What do we have to do to support these releases? What we need for photo shoots, video shoots, social media content, influencer seeding, UGC. Categorize those out and then go across all your releases. What we need to do for each of those plans. For some brands, it's like weekly releases, big releases. This becomes a really comprehensive planning moment. For some brands, you're just dropping a handful of things. We can be a little bit less, but you need to really map that out. So for me and my brand personally, I'm trying to do way more content shoots next week. I do a shoot and I do behind the scenes in the shoot. I sell a lot of products. When I don't do a shoot or I try to milk a shoot, as long as I can, it doesn't work. The more shoots I am doing, it feels like the better my stuff is going to go. So I am very focused on mapping every single thing out around shoots. I'm trying to do like a shoot a month, maybe more. And then around that comes, I need to be seeding around that. I'm doing behind the scenes content. There's content coming out about it. What are we trying to try? What networks are they on? I'm not going to get extremely deep into the nuance of this, but map out for every release you have listed. That could be five, it could be 50. What content are we doing to support it? Sometimes this way, when you see me do multi-day workshops, this will be an entire day. This is just release content plan. So don't be afraid if it takes time, you need to come back to it. And if we have a recurring meeting for your business around it, even if that meeting is just with yourself. The next step is tests. What are we not doing from a content perspective? We want to try and have the ability to actually test. I've been listing those things out. Hey, we want to try YouTube. We want to try more influencer work. We need to get UGC creators. We're doing TikTok shop. List out what your tests are. And then again, get to an actionable framework. Are we going to test it? Yes, maybe. And then I would define the maybe. We'll test it if we're doing this much revenue. We hire this person. What is the gate? Identify the gate. It's a lot of what we get to in these exercises. Get down to what will define yes or no we're going to do it. Or it's unlikely we're actually going to test this even though we want to. Be honest with yourself. And then last, we're going to hit success metrics. What does success look like to us? And this is an interesting combo because usually a lot of people will say, oh, success is what we need to post every day. It's the time to dispel those kind of myths. We need to get a million views. We need 50,000 followers. It doesn't matter. None of this matters. All vanity metrics. Those are not metrics that matter. I will literally get paid egregious sums by teams to come in and be able to tell their leadership team it does not matter how many social media followers you have. Your only metric that really matters is are you making the sales? All right, well, great. We don't need 50,000 followers. Are we making the sales? Are we getting the interest? Are we getting the email signups? What are the metrics that we want to identify and lock those down? And it's worth noting one of the things that comes up a lot with retail we end up using is like, hey, are we having visibility? It is a views-based metric because a lot of brands that sell in retail where you can't really measure the sell-through of that is like, are we getting visibility in key regions? And that ends up being a conversation a lot of like, hey, we're actually expanding into Canada. We need more Canada views. We need to be able to show retailers we're getting Canada views. How do we prove to retailers our content and our social is working? Okay, if we walk in with these kinds of posts, all right, we're doing 1 million views a month in Canada. That's something that we can show to London Drugs or somewhere in Canada that we're selling in and be stoked about it and have them be stoked about it. And so that you begin to actually develop useful strategy. That brings us to channels. Nice transition there. So your channels for your business are selling via ads online, TikTok, Meta, Apple Oven. Not spending a lot of money. Just ignore that last phrase, pretend like you didn't hear it. Organic. What are we selling just by doing our email, our social posts, existing website traffic, SEO. Wholesale. What do we sell at retail? What do we sell in our own stores? We're just pure retail. What do we sell with partners and in partnerships? Literally, we just map those out. Advertising-based DTC sales. Organic DTC sales. Wholesale sales to other stores. Sales to our own retail. Sales through partners or other providers, value-added resellers, whatever. Identify which of those are we doing and focused on. Now, are we going to try any new ones? And then back to when. When are we going to try it? What are the gates to unlock it? Hey, we want to open our own retail store. Okay, we want to do that this year. We want to do that next year. What revenue do we need to be at or what parameters or things need to happen for us to do it? List those out so you have an actual checklist to do it. This is the biggest thing you'll learn from this video or takeaways. If you want to do something, you literally map out what are the things that have to happen to do it and what is the yes-no for me to do it or not. Okay, I'll do that when I'm at $100K in revenue. Great. We've decided it. We're going to do it when we're at $100K in revenue. Once you actually have that commitment, again, it can just be to yourself. If you're a one-person business where you have that consensus among a group, you have to lock that in. Sometimes I'll rabbit hole for an hour getting to a consensus on some specific thing, but that means you're walking away with clarity. The teams know. And then last is success metrics for these. So for instance, you go into advertising. What's our success metric? Oh, we need a 2.1 ROAS. Actually, we don't really want a 2.1 ROAS because this or that, we need to have a higher ROAS. Actually, we don't need a higher ROAS. Hack these conversations out. ROAS is return on ad spend if you're new to that. It's like, okay, what is our make money level? Are we judging it based on our customer acquisition costs or their lifetime value? Are we basing it on first sale profitable? You actually want to be seeing, there's a whole number of things that come in here. What do we view like success? What does success look like at retail? How many units per store per week? Levels of POs, new engaged. There are a whole number of things to think through here, but I would just try to go through all the channels you are in and define what does success look like to you. Now we're going to talk through threats and mitigation. Like one more peek around Barcelona. Now I'm going to talk about probably the most important thing here, which is accountability charts. Threats and mitigation. This is a good old fashioned brainstorm exercise. Whiteboard, big column. What are threats to our business? Column one. Column two. What can we do about it? Now, when it happens, often these things will happen. Threats, there's a whole number of them. So for instance, I am an influencer. I sell all my products based on the fact that I'm an influencer. What would happen if I was canceled? Or I, the social networks changed. I could no longer influence. What can I prepare to do now? One is get more voices talking about my product than just me. That could be something I could work on now. Second is make sure the Facebook ads model to new customers have nothing to do with my business. It's like locked in and scaling. That's number two. And then what would happen if it actually went down? Say I was no longer able to do this. It's like, all right, find another personality to take it over. Focus on Facebook ad scaling. People have no idea that I am able to move this budget here or whatever. God forbid. But again, you're playing through threats. Retailer company, you know, someone comes into the competitive price. A quality issue. Get kicked off the shelf at retail. Someone comes out with a better product, cheaper, whatever. You need to map through all those threats. And again, just go through those columns and lock down those two things. The last thing here, the secret sauce of this entire video is we've now gone through all of this, right? We've gone through what are the products we want to release? What products are we releasing? What's the calendar where releases are? What are all the holes in that calendar? How are we going to patch those holes? What are the content we have to create around those releases? What do we want to test? We've gone through the channels. Where are we selling? How do we better support them? And we went through all our worries. What is it that's going to stop? Now it's who's going to do it? This is the biggest one. Because you can talk to as many ideas as you want. I mean, with all these companies have a big Slack channel where they share videos. Like we share your videos all the time. We want to do this or that. And then so few of them actually do it. Basically, it's a 50-50 type of company. There's companies that are like, oh, we're doing all these things. And I want to do more of them and get better at it. And there's companies that are like, we share them all. We can't figure out how to actually act. The accountability chart is a big one. Basically, every single thing on this list that doesn't already have someone in charge, I will go through basically every release that you're doing. Every release that you want to do. Every piece of content that you want to make. Type of content, bucket, whatever it is. Every launch, every event, every sales channel. List it out. Big list. And you're going to have a little set of tabs here. Do we have to do this? We need to do it. Company has to do it to grow and survive. Do we want to do it? We're doing it because we want to. At the end of the day, it's a nice to have. We didn't do it. We're not going to die. Third is it's too much. We went through it. We're probably not going to be able to do this this year. Too much column. And it's good to just admit it. The last column is who is accountable? Who would be in charge? Because then it begins to really impact these other columns. You go, all right, we have to do this. All right, well, who's going to do it? Is it me? Is it a new hire? Is it this person in the company? Is it that person in the company? Who is in charge of TikTok shop? Who is in charge of our influencer strategy for this release? Who is in charge of making sure this new product comes to life? Who's in charge of this licensing project? And assign that accountability. And everyone's going to be like, all these companies are too busy. Everyone's mapped out. No one's ever too busy. No one's ever too mapped out. Every company I talk to, basically everyone is underutilized. If you are a founder and you're probably spending way too much time on Twitter or doing whatever it is you're doing online and focusing on your business, you also can be more utilized. The other thing is I was meeting with a friend of mine this morning who had just clawed back his business from all the agencies he's outsourced to. And it was just like, I realized, and I've been in the same scenario before in my life where, hey, I want more time as a founder. I'm going to go to these agencies. They're going to take these things off my plate. Oh, what do I do with all this time? Oh, I could be doing everything better once the agencies are doing, okay, now I take everything back. So that happens a lot. So if you're a founder, you probably have time. Dude, don't always be thinking about Literally, you have to go through that chart. And again, if you're a one-person business, it's going to be you. All right, then you might put more stuff in the too much column. Or you might say, hey, I need to hire somebody part-time or full-time or on Upwork or whatever it looks like. You're going to break this all down. And the last piece is you're going to assign dates. When do we need this stuff to happen by? And if things are hairy or complicated like TikTok shop, or we're just going to get it done by May 1, maybe too unrealistic, break it down one more level. Okay, to do that, we need to make sure we have SKU and compliance info on every one of our products. And we need to set this thing up and do that thing, break it down into more steps and assign dates to those steps will always make any date more understandable. Just keep breaking it down to simpler tasks. Assign the dates to all these things on this list. It's another one where you're starting to move more stuff into the too much column because the dates you look at, you're like, oh, ----, we can't actually do all this. Or you're going to look at it like, man, okay, we got to get to it. Then you look at your check-in cadence. This is the last one. Who needs to meet about it and ruthlessly cut people off meetings so they don't need to be a part. And again, it can be a meeting with yourself, whatever it is. But how are we checking in on where the progress is? We have to have some kind of cadence. We're doing this monthly. We're doing this weekly. That's it. This is the structure I use on talking through this kind of stuff with companies all the time. I thought you would find it valuable to apply to your own business as you're planning for the year. I'm doing a bunch of that planning myself while I'm here in Spain. And if you actually go and map through this and act on this, I guarantee it will be an improvement for your business. Drop any comments or any questions you have. And thank you all so much for watching.